Month: January 2008

I’ve been reading over old ubicomp papers in preparation for a new project at NICTA. So it was that I found myself reading “Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing“, by Gregory Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt (whom, incidentally, should surely be listed among those ubiquitous computing researchers who inspire me – particularly Abowd, Read more about Finding a human need[…]

Johnny Lee from CMU’s HCI Institute has done some pretty cool things with the Wiimote. His Ph.D. project has also yielded some way cool stuff. Here’s just a few of the things he’s done on his own and with his colleagues. Truly inspiring.

Ben delicioused me a link to an interesting paper called “Bowl: token-based media for children“. It describes a media player that is controlled by placing various objects (tokens) into a bowl. The idea was to create a control interface that is easy for children to use and which establishes links between particular physical objects and Read more about Bowl: token-based media for children[…]

Last week I read a 2004 paper called MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. It was written by a couple of Google researchers, and details a simple programming model and library for processing large datasets in parallel. MapReduce is used by Google under the hood for lots of different things, from indexing to machine Read more about MapReduce[…]

Today marks six months since Xander was born. We marked the occasion by dashing off to South Bank as soon as the sun broke out from behind the clouds. It was a nice break from the dramas of the last couple of weeks and a nice way to spend the last day of holidays for Read more about Xander 0.5[…]

On Saturday we had planned to take Xander to Tamborine Mountain for a walk in the rainforest. Little did we know that most of the routes (if not all the routes) up to the mountain were closed due to flooding. The photos below show the flooded Clutha Creek near the small town of Tamborine. We Read more about Trip to Tamborine Mountain aborted[…]

2007 was a huge year for my family and me. The main event was, of course, the birth of our son, Xander, on 07/07/07. For that reason, 2007 is one of the best years on record, but also one of the most challenging. Karen’s done a wonderful job and made some pretty big sacrifices… Unfortunately Read more about Goodbye 7, hello 8[…]